Pirate Bay Founder Creating NSA-Proof Mobile Messenger - The UpStream

Pirate Bay Founder Creating NSA-Proof Mobile Messenger

Since the NSA PRISM program was first exposed, there has been a lot of discussion about how secure our data really is. Once Microsoft's recent revelation that Skype communications, text, audio and video, had their encryption circumvented, an obvious market opened itself up: an NSA-proof messenger.

While Apple has repeatedly said that iMessage is encrypted, so is Skype, and an American company, under NSA order, could still circumvent their own encryption again. So, what is the solution? A non-American messenger who highly encrypts their data. That is the dream of Peter Sunde, one of the co-founders of The Pirate Bay.

The program, called Heml.is, is currently being crowd funded. If the project gets funded, the app will be free with a paid version for features, such as picture messaging. It will also be the first of what I suspect will be many new products that will sprint up around the idea of personal privacy. It might even indicate a shift in public opinion about online security that could affect companies like Google and Facebook negatively.